It seems like a long time since 2012. From a rugby perspective, Ireland were on a downward curve, while Leinster managed to pick up a third star on their jersey. Johnny Sexton was officially Ireland’s No 10 and he played in all of Ireland’s Six Nations games that season.
here were a number of comings-and-goings on the international front, however it is the comings – three arrivals – to our shores back then that are worthy of appraisal now as the players who arrived in 2012 are heading home after varying degrees of success.
CJ Stander, Quinn Roux and Michael Bent are all finishing their careers in Ireland at the end of this season – a little bit of critical analysis is required here.
I admire CJ Stander as a player. It was a comparative rarity to see him have a poor game. It is a sure sign of quality when the team have a bad day at the office and you look around to see who is still functioning – who is still putting in the effort when others have raised the white flag.
Stander’s enthusiasm and stoicism in the face of adversity sometimes made you ask who cared more for the jersey. I don’t know the guy, but he gave an honourable account of himself every time he played in red and in green and took time to assimilate himself into the hearts and minds of the Irish rugby public.
Stander did not make Warren Gatland’s 37-man Lions squad, but the fact that he will be in South Africa in June and in reasonable shape means there is a strong chance that when the first back-row player picks up any sort of injury, Stander will be picked as a stand-by replacement. Given the Lions’ well-publicised state of penury, it’s all the better if you don’t have to fly someone down.
There is, however, something incongruous about bringing a South African to play against his native country on a Lions tour, in the same way that it is a joke bringing Duhan van der Merwe home to play against his countrymen. Stander at least stayed in the country he was playing for – Van der Merwe, a wet week out of his three-year residency, jumped across the border to play his rugby for Worcester.
Edinburgh was not good enough for him, but he gets rewarded with a Lions tour. How does Jonny May get up in the morning when he has to think of that every day between now and when the tour starts?
Stander’s brilliantly constructed press release left far too many questions that haven’t been answered. The reaction of shock and surprise by all his team-mates was anything but. Most of them seemed to know Stander was going home well before his announcement.
Stander put his body on the line and was well rewarded for his efforts. Any money he got, he earned. However, I do not think that Stander will retire from “all rugby” at the tender age of 31. Charlie McCreevy’s sportsman’s tax break may have something to do with the announcement that Stander would be retiring from all rugby.
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Stander was on a good number with a central contract and given that you can reclaim 42pc of 40 pc of your gross earnings, outside of endorsements, that could add up to nearly €500k over a 10-season career in Ireland. The only kicker is that you have to be resident in Ireland for tax purposes when you retire to get it and you also have to permanently retire from the game. That is, retire forever from all rugby.
Fair play to him if he rides off into the sunset with that sort of dough and then best of luck trying to claw it back if he does decide to continue to play in South Africa. The euro is worth 17 Rand now. It is a fortune.
Stander is, by a distance, the best project player to come through the system in Ireland. What, though, is the return on investment of all the others? That is the key ratio. How much time, effort and expense was put into these players to the detriment of Irish players who were, you know, born here, which is kind of a crucial criterion when it comes to actually playing for Ireland.
The sausage machine here, that is the professional structure, playing and training environment and infrastructure, is second to none in Europe. If you throw any dummy into it with a modicum of ability, they will undoubtedly improve in all aspects of play.
Michael Bent arrived on these shores in 2012. He picked up four Ireland caps between 2012 and 2015 and was never capped again. In the meantime, he played 155 times for Leinster, a decent body of work. Each year he got better. If you spend nine or 10 seasons in the champion province, you can’t but improve.
Bent’s contract kept being renewed and he became part of the furniture. The PR blurb told us that he was not just the best scrummager on the planet, but in the entire universe and people believed it. Bent certainly improved his scrummaging from the time he arrived and he was decent at a certain level for the last season or so. The problem here is that Bent got to a certain level of proficiency, but only just, and literally at the time of retirement.
Can you justify all that investment over that length of time for that return? Bent could hold his own at PRO14 level, but struggled in the Heineken Cup. You wonder why Leinster would not pile that love and understanding on some of the quality props they regularly allow to go elsewhere when most of them are as good as Bent was when he started off in this country.
Being a nice guy and having the respect of the squad is all well and good, but at the end of the day you are running a business and all of your props have to meet the standards required at Heineken Cup level. This investing in journeymen, particularly from the other side of the planet, will have to stop.
I wonder if Quinn Roux had stayed in South Africa what level or status would he have reached? Would he have got 100 caps or even 16 for the Springboks? We all know the answer.
For all his failings, Matt O’Connor still had the smarts to realise that Roux was hopeless, and he shipped him out to Connacht as quickly as he could.
Roux had a mini-revival out west and managed to pick up a few caps for Ireland. Once again, the blurb machine told us that Roux arrived at a certain amount of rucks per game and cleared out X of them. Then we were told that Roux was the greatest scrummager on the planet – even better than Bent.
Scrummaging, I always thought, is a unit skill. A team of eight. No one
second-row on the tight-head side was going to justify his selection solely on how good he was as a scrummager, but people who had never been in a scrum in their lives believed this crap. Can’t handle, can’t carry, can’t off-load, can’t tackle. The list goes on.
Roux is a big unit, this is true, but when I think of big units I think of Will Skelton and how devastatingly effective he can be, the damage he can cause, and what a phenomenal handler of the ball he is. Being big is only a very small part of it.
Roux has decided to leave Connacht and Ireland for France. We hear it might be Toulon – it definitely won’t be La Rochelle. I don’t think Jonno Gibbes and ROG will be paying out any money here. The word durability came into the frame last week. Roux has played six matches for Connacht since December 2019 – a pretty skinny return on investment. As I watched Kane Douglas loll around the park for Bordeaux against Toulouse, I thought Roux could get away with it for three years or more there before he heads back to South Africa.
What I have written may be harsh, but the reality is that when January 1, 2022 comes around and regulation 8.1 of the World Rugby constitution changes the residency law to five years, we won’t have to embarrass ourselves anymore by picking up waifs and strays, who are no better than the players we produce here, and put them on a pedestal in the hope that they might turn out to be decent .
How gullible are we?